Thursday, 28 April 2022

And now... TalkTV - it must be time for a rethink of TV news


  April 27th 2022 V 0.1

 

And now... TalkTV - it must be time for a rethink of TV news

Oh well... it's a clone of GBNews with a fatter budget.


There is something surreal about news agenda priorities and the way that TV news in the UK is not adequately analysing the growing threat of a nuclear response. The isolated nut jobs in the Kremlin are plainly not enjoying the goading from the West - which is enjoying the sight of Russia's armed forces being humiliated. We're not sure what is more stressful - watching Steve Coogan's flagging career being given a plug on the BBC sofa, or the prospect of glowing in the dark?

And now GBNews and TalkTV are fighting over exactly the same silent majority/ moderate conservative/ "realistic right" audience... and advertisers! But Talk TV has VASTLY more resource from the Murdoch coffers, and his newspapers to plug it. Realistically, GBNews is doomed... so is there a way for them to combine their efforts, and set about creating examples of fresh thinking that is obviously better than turgid BBC TV? Not hard, you would think. We just wish it was possible to lose the commercials;  NOBODY likes the interruptions, do they?

Then the BBC could be shut down and rebooted as a simple (and cheap) public service broadcaster to appease the nations with Welsh, Gaelic, and the Thoughts of Chairman (sic) Sturgeon, without any need for a detailed discussion with the BBC?

It's not obvious why Sky News (now owned by US behemoth Comcast) has chosen to be another stronghold of the hectoring woke hegemony. Possibly because of the mania/malaise that has overtaken the US since the last presidential election - when even more evidence is emerging that the big plutocrat money with a globalist WEF agenda, did indeed influence the election for the worst president in history. Remember that "political correctness" - a precursor to "woke" - (https://www.ourcivilisation.com/pc.htm) originated in the US in the 80s when big business did the sums and realised that traditional WASP demographics were being overtaken by "non-WASP" (https://www.chicagoreporter.com/the-us-white-majority-will-soon-disappear-forever/), and that these were the consumers of the future. Big business could not afford to be called out for advertising with media that was not pushing a relentlessly positive BAME agenda.

The BBC has no commercial pressures, having led many years of charmed life and spent the past 20 years mocking the audience that pays its stipend. The last time the BBC produced anything properly entertaining was 20 years ago - before the woke revolution stripped humour from its tedious output. 'Ello 'ello, Only Fools, Porridge, Yes Minister etc. Not forgetting Doctor Who, before Russell T Davis turned into a tiresome sequence of woke sermons.

So while the BBC and Westminster bubble obsesses over beer, cake, and parties - we should all be a LOT more angry about the COLOSSAL increase in energy costs, the coming food shortages, inflation destroying savings - and the other consequences of a supine parliament being apparently helpless to do anything meaningful about any of it.

"Net Zero" perfectly sums up the Carrie and BJ clown show.

A sense of proportion is completely missing from the cloistered world of the BBC as it carries on regardless to push it's tiresome metrolectual liberal elite woke agenda. Dominic Littlewood telling us when it's the best time to buy a new car and much coverage of £34k+ EVs with their dubious economics and uncertain battery futures. These are still basically experimental electric prototypes because only Hydrogen fuels cells have a real future. A £60k tesla may be fun for the Islington set that drives 40 miles a week to Waitrose and a Hampstead eatery, but not for the rest of us, living out in the real world. And with a perfectly good car that has been built at the zenith of the internal combustion art, and able to last a good 25 years with reasonable maintenance, and deliver 50 mpg. It's interesting that the once-cynical motoring press has been bought by the terrifying performance of many 2 ton EVs with acceleration of 0-60 in under 5 seconds... we digress....

So then, how about developing a combination of TalkTV with GBN?  They could share the adaptable "focal coverage" of emerging trending events, (we hesitate to call it Twitter TV, but...) , and between them continue to expose the irrelevance (and bias) of BBC news and social engineering coverage..?

We are being desensitized to the Ukraine situation, and not putting enough pressure on politicians to sort it out. There is a good argument for the launch of a dedicated news channel that reports the Ukraine situation from all points of view. Especially the horrors and cynical funding for Putin from Germany, plus weapons from France. But the BBC's relentless pro-EU fanaticism is throttling its ability to call out EU countries that are feeding the Russia problem.

There's no shortage of reporting going on in Ukraine if you look just slightly away from mainstream narratives and news services. The reports just need to be gathered, collated, knocked into shape and given "warnings" where necessary. 



Will this cause kids to be traumatized? We suggest that those that play any sort of computer games will already be desensitized to the sight of body parts flying in all directions. The benefits of educating them in the realities of modern politics and its infinite capacity for hypocrisy may outweigh the trauma. After all, it's not as if this is a short-term event, we are now being warned the Ukraine War may last up to 10 years! Really?

Meanwhile, the German cash is paying for devastation like this - maybe they should be required to deposit an equivalent amount in the fund to rebuild Ukraine?

The battle for Popasnaya

What can possibly be done shorten it? The oligarchs would really love to get their yachts and bank account access back. And the west needs to be able to buy cheaper oil and gas once more. So please let's work on developing that theme? Shame the Germans and others that continue supporting the Russian war machine.

Rupert Murdoch's News TV project looked moribund from the off. If only he had had the nerve to launch it as the Ukraine channel, and put Piers Morgan on the front line in a helmet... but Rebekah Brooks - the old school print exec who is in charge in the UK - does not seem to understand the medium and its possibilities. Nevertheless, top marks to Julia Hartley-Brewer who is giving excellent Douglas Murray the opportunity to do what he does best - tell it like it is, not how the Islington liberal hive-mind wished it was.

Sunday, 17 April 2022

Elon Musk steps up for the global leadership vacancy

An evolving history of the world : the global leadership vacancy  

 April 18th 2022 V 0.4


The world's richest (and most driven) man: boring he ain't...
{check the wikipedia entry}
 


Let's set the scene with the challenges facing a would-be leader. In effect, Musk is setting out to grasp the baton of thought leadership via Twitter. This post is going to evolve, so please come back and review progress. As long as the target keeps moving, it may never reach V1.0, and it will be a major mission to try and get there... 

George perfectly sums up why the present Twitter board are trying to make Elon go away... in a single sentence


"...If I was pure evil and wanted to control global public debate in a simple, subtle but utterly pernicious way, I could do no better than invent twitter...."

But first a word about plutocrats by one...

From a 2014 Ted Talk...

Nick Hanauer is a rich guy, an unrepentant capitalist — and he has something to say to his fellow plutocrats: Wake up! Growing inequality is about to push our societies into conditions resembling pre-revolutionary France. Hear his argument about why a dramatic increase in minimum wage could grow the middle class, deliver economic prosperity ... and prevent a revolution.

The way forward is not managing the status-quo, but innovation that solves problems and focusses on growing a thriving middle class.

When I started this piece in October 2021, I observed that the world has been a relatively stable place since WW2 with only a number of "local difficulties" in the form of regionally contained conflicts. NATO has kept Europe safe from Russian ambitions, and the sheer overwhelming nature of the US military machine kept the lid on around the globe, while China remained an enigmatic oriental conundrum that kept very much to itself behind a bamboo wall. Japan was mostly confined to the far East and Pacific during the second World War, but with few natural resources and no significant military alliances, it has not since been a global military threat, and instead focused on manufacturing and trading its way to prosperity. The same lesson was also learnt eventually by Germany, with its subtle but effective control of the European Union to provide workers and customers for its industry.

Religious rivalry in the Indian subcontinent remains unresolved, in fact religious rivalry remains unresolved just about everywhere. But with India and Pakistan both (openly) having nuclear weapons, it's a major worry. If they actually believed their religious teachings, neither has anything to fear from the afterlife themselves...

The fractured nature of Islamic factions across the middle and far East is not resolving itself, and a glance at the population figures in Islamic states suggests a long game of "overwhelm by numbers".

According to a Japanese university - https://www.waseda.jp/top/en/news/53405 - the world population of Muslims has been increasing significantly in recent times. The Muslim world population stood approximately at 1.6 billion in 2013 and is estimated to reach 2.9 billion (making up 26% of the world population) by 2050. There are currently 21 Muslim-majority Asian and African countries highly influenced by Islam. None are tolerant democracies in the western sense. Among them, countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey are expected to grow as consumer markets, 1.2 billion in terms of consumer population.

Meantime, the unchallenged supremacy of the US as the "world policeman" has dramatically declined under Obama and now Biden. In the past 20 years, the emergence of drones has confused the once unchallenged value of manned fighters and ground attack aircraft. Bombers were already overtaken by cruise and ballistic missiles from the 60s and 70s - with countries outside NATO using tech stolen by classic spying, supplemented by cyber incursions and intercepts;  and also acquired more subtly by the flood of foreign students at Western universities. 

It has never been simpler for the disloyal to send secret information around the world for profit or philosophy... revenge on a system they want to destroy without bothering about due democratic process.

A further subtle development has been the adoption of English as the global second language - especially in science and transport. There are more English speakers in China than England.

English speaking countries grew from the times of the British Empire, when Rhodes observed that "to be born an Englishman is to win life's lottery". Such a statement is regarded as insensitive to those cultures that do not share the Empire heritage, but it remains a realistic if uncomfortable truth. Of course, the fact that Cecil Rhodes, has been "cancelled" by woke culture, led by the Education establishment, which pays little regard to current reality in pursuit of a coercive agenda of thought control through dogma and doctrine, to establish its preferred new reality.

The British Empire also introduced (or imposed, if you must) a legal and parliamentary system that is based on Common Law, which is a topic for further discussion and analysis, along with a review of the state of democracy, as financial reality increasingly suggests that democracy is a function of affordability.

In 2022, the world is a far less certain place, with China - by sheer dint of numbers - now in possession of nearly all the industrial and military cards. Whilst the US - for all its critics - did a fair if occasionally clumsy job of promoting democracy, China doesn't make any secret of its agenda to promote its own best interests at almost any cost to human rights. China does not do democracy, which is an anathema for a society that can only function through unquestioning conformity.

China's territorial expansion includes its declared intention to re-annexe Taiwan; Hong Kong's assimilation is a done deal and serves to remind that there is no such thing as an equitable deal - where China is concerned. Its own best interests will always prevail - try and stop them! It now has footholds across Africa, and has thoroughly rattled resource-rich Australia in recent years. The lithium rich mountains of unruly Afghanistan are on the shopping list. However, Afghanistan has confounded all presumptive world powers for centuries by its ability to be fundamentally ungovernable. We shall see...

A previous essay in the series set out the state of the post Empire United Kingdom following World War II, so where does a global perspective now leave the United Kingdom? Currently, something of a shambles with the home Nations unhelpfully set against each other by Tony Blair's unhelpful gerrymandering strategy of national devolution. This most notably resulted in the emergence of a conniving demagogue in Scotland, just as the rest of the world has become far less secure and predictable, and it is more important  than it has been since WW2 for the nations of the United Kingdom to avoid squabbling rivalry. The petty antagonism between Edinburgh and London is not serving any discernible useful purpose for the people of the UK.

Many conspiracies have been swirling around the idea that China has carefully and thoroughly infiltrated the US Democrat party and supporters to influence US policy. There really needs to be a forensic examination of the vulnerability of the curious US election process where there are almost no identity checks and "voting machines" that send results around the world for processing to determine the fate of not just the US but the free world. The stakes are such that we are all involved, and entitled to ask questions - and get answers. It is increasingly obvious that the best interests of the United States and free world are not being served by a president who can barely function.

The way that the media which helped to promote and install Joe Biden and his administration is now looking down at its feet in embarrassment is more than simply "unfortunate". The role of media (and money) when influencing politics around elections needs to be better defined and closely monitored.

However, the hopelessly divided political situation in the US means that half the country regards the other half as naively under the influence of a right-wing egomaniac, and that half regards the other as a coterie of communism, manipulating a senile and barely functional frontman, soon to be replaced by the rapidly unraveling Kamala Harris.

Worryingly, there is much remarkably obvious evidence to support both of these contentions. Which of course plays into the hands of America's enemies in Russia and China.

Biden's clumsy retreat from Afghanistan appears to have handed the vast Lithium resources over to China. The Biden administration does not appear to be in control while the general disruption and division of US society created by BLM and campaigns to defund police, continue to reinforce division. Including in the US military. A US retreat into introspective isolation - never mind the expansive but ultimately empty words of the administration, suits Russia and China just fine for the time being.

Remember Comrade Bezmenov's advice that the US would destroy itself from the the inside, and then consider just where the doctrine of Political Correctness has taken the US since Reagan observed in 1975 that if fascism ever arrived in the US, it would come disguised as liberalism.


Awkward.

Never underestimate the depth and subtlety of the games being played. There is no doubt that both China and Russia understand the nature of the information society better than the western marketing minds that developed the internet as a marketing machine for social media (especially), with cookies and other forms of individual tracking in the first place. Totalitarian societies (cf 1984) understand the crucial roles of propaganda and fake news. The diplomacy game has evolved, and gunboats have been replaced (supplemented) by weaponized information. 

A revolution once involved insurgents taking over the national TV station and shooting the president. Now they take over the fact-checkers and key media influencers, and deplatform the President.

The move to buy Twitter by Elon Musk  could be a game changer. He appears to want to re-establish the idea of freedom of expression and discussion. It's not beyond possibility that he's bidding for the vacant role as leader of the world...

Twitter and other social media has progressively closed down debate and free speech by prescriptive censorship - not all of which is obvious.  The insidious "shadow ban" leaves users to go on ranting and raving, but not being penned in their echo chambers if allowing their heretic views reach a wider audience there is a danger of damage to Twitter's commercial strategy.

A US version of Russell Brand - An0maly - does a good job of analysing - remember you can speed up playback 1.5x and easily follow... he explores the topic in a unique and disarming way - he runs on a bit, but in such a way that you can be pretty confident that he is expressing honestly held views...



If Elon does close this deal, he will become a major influence broker and be a folk hero among those who are trying to strip misdirection, hypocrisy and social engineering from social media. We hope his heart is in the right place. Musk is very much a risk-taker, and a believer that market driven capitalism delivers the best results.

The way Twitter is trying to resist Musk in not commercially rational, and suggests they are far too attached to their power. Interesting times.



Fast forward to 10:03 to go to the Musk segment - although the discussion of markets that  precedes it is worth the time...

And then here is the state of  play on April 16th as Twitter attempts to poison the deal so Musk goes away.  But no one is yet asking and discussing "what does it cost to launch an alternative and better Twitter?" The answer is not nearly as much as buying Twitter. 

Musk is assured of many millions of his fans signing up on day one.

 


Let's hope Elon has worked that out, and is going to sell his stake to the mug private equity business that appears to planning to outbid him, and ups the price he already paid. Using that profit, Elon could then have the Twitter killer developed inside 3 months (it really is a simple software task) destroy Twitter value within 12 months. 

This just in, Elon musk at TED
 

 
And the full further earlier interview with Chris Anderson.


Given that Russia/Ukraine seems to be playing out as a visceral spat between Mafia bosses - where no other country has actually got the cojones to put boots on the ground and  flesh in the game, whilst being happy to see how Russia performs agaisnt a number of motivated guerillas armed with a minimal number of weapons, the new world leader's first proper job is to tackle unresolved questions around the origin and propagation of a certain virus. Whoever emerges to lead the free World needs to strip away the rumours and conspiracy.  

About the only thing we do know for sure is that it started in China and spread out from Wuhan ...the rest is yet to be explained. All leaders seem scared to grasp this nettle in case the evidence of a Chinese conspiracy is inescapable.  After all - what would anyone be able to do about it?  Send them to the naughty step? Ask them to refund the 5 trillion dollars their negligence has caused? 


## Work in progress

 

Saturday, 16 April 2022

The wise monkeys of media: reaching behind the iron curtain

Why do "ordinary Russians" not know what is being carried out in their name, and protest? 

V 1.1 27APR22

The wise monkeys of media: reaching behind the iron curtain

Life is about the organisation of many conflicting priorities, and keeping it simple. Every decision making process starts with a need for reliable news and information.

Version 1.0 of this post didn't last long before it has been overtaken by events again... 10 days to be precise. Twitter goes headless chicken, Ukraine nuclear threats getting louder as the West rallies to support what no longer appears to be a lost cause - as Russia's limited military  competence is exposed by resourceful Ukrainians,  inflation balloons, food shortage forecasts.  The need for a single trustable source of authoritative, cohorent and fact-based news to reach beyond the censors and to override the number of dangerously subjective commentaries that are proliferating, is more crucial by the day. The cacophony or conflicting opinions grows louder. What a pity, the  BBC World Service has been compromised over the past 20 years as most attention has been diverted into online projects.

Just how significant is it that the people of Russia do not know what atrocities are being carried out in their name? It's fundamental! makes the case well in The Conversation: Shortwave radio in Ukraine: why revisiting old-school technology makes sense in a war

Former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov describes how Marxism has been eating western democracy from the inside - especially the USA - and how Russia has quite brilliantly played the long subversion game. It turns out that "leftists" are useful idiots who serve only to destabilize the society.  Bezmenov is a KGB trained subverter, and in this video he tells about the influence of the Soviet Union on Western media and describes the stages of communist takeovers. This interview was conducted by G. Edward Griffin in 1984. Complete interview https://youtu.be/Cnf0I2dQ0i0
 

 
 

Orwell's 1984 made the point about the crucial importance of controlling the messages delivered by Big Brother. The lesson learned by totalitarians and tyrants during WW2 was that news by radio is a powerful influence, and that oppressed populations would go out of their way to try to access it when they realized their own country's big-brother was trying to conceal awkward and inconvenient truths.

When the internet became ubiquitous in the 80s, most of the world's broadcasters abandoned shortwave radio as a means of communicating with their overseas audiences. Finally switching off in 2011. But while the Russians and Chinese did not demolish their transmission capabilities, the UK and US completely abandoned them,  and even demolished the transmission sites that could once deliver radio signals directly into the homes of all 8 billion of the planet's inhabitants.

Effective news broadcasting requires that there is a degree of trust between broadcaster and listener - something the BBC had established over many years to the envy of the world.

While there has been endless talk of the influence on politics and elections by foreign intervention, and endless talk of "fake news", the loss of access to trusted news radio that could not be cancelled or doctored by "psyops" was not taken into consideration. However, it was a lot simpler for Russia (and China?) to target regimes/countries and arrange for "useful fools" to be in charge of overlooked strategic resources to ensure that the west lost its ability to reach behind despot firewalls in times of emergency. The BBC and Voice of America were once able to reach just about everyone on the planet who had access to a £10 portable radio. And the broadcasters took it for granted, and then allowed internet and cellular to shatter and dissipate that audience over >50000 alternative delivery routes - all potentially controlled by a tyrant with a firewall switch.



“It’s often said truth is the first casualty of war,” Tim Davie, director-general of the BBC, said in a statement. “In a conflict where disinformation and propaganda is rife, there is a clear need for factual and independent news people can trust.”

It's a pity the BBC has lost so much of the respect and trust of its UK licence payers over the past couple of years by promoting a "liberal metrolectual narrative" that fuels the divide that crystallized around the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016. It is not so much about the traditional politics of left and right as it about the chattering classes and establishment elites, versus populism and the silent majority: globalists versus nationalists- "remainers" versus leavers. 

Globalism encompasses most liberal elites - and also the interests of big businesses. It is the mantra of those who support the aims of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the clubs of elite economies at Davos and Bildeberg, and there is substantial and growing populist opposition who have been shocked by the WEF proposition that "we will soon own nothing - and be happy".

The BBC seems to believe that its audience reflects its view of the world, where half are (younger) enlightened liberals, rejoicing in and promoting the BBC's woke metrolectual globalist philosophy  ... and the other half are (older) "populists"; dismissed as dangerous right wing conspiracy theorists who require constant re-education, and that need to be kept away from polite liberal society until they repent and accept that Aunty Knows Best. The view that they are mostly retired and due to expire soon enough anyway, so not worthy of inclusion, is widely held in "progressive" media and politics. These same unenlightened conservative folks are also actively cancelling the BBC licence fee in their thousands, and finding their news and entertainment amongst the other 5000 channels. The Facebook Group "I hate the BBC" is the largest of several online groups where dissidents gather to express their outrage at the BBC.

This creates a problem for a government that needs to have a way to communicate en masse to convey important messages in real time. Awkward things like pandemics, natural disasters and wars happen, when the need to send the same message to everyone at the same time can be a matter of life and death. The UK government is presently mismanaging the evolution of public service broadcasting and the future of the BBC - by managing to conflate and distil the worst of all worlds. 

The UK government has been overtaken by inexperienced advisers who have eagerly bet - based on their own experience - that the smartphone will be the fulcrum of all future lifestyles. Including establishing a means of enabling a universal tracked identity, which is required as a cornerstone of the shift towards a cashless society controlled by politicians and civil servants.

All your communication will be carried out online and "branded" with your tracked digital ID - because it's "good for you" - remember, own nothing and be happy.

Yes, there will be those who object, loudly. But as long as the means of communicating dissent are controlled by the same politicians, these objections can be diverted and dissipated across 5000 channels of anodyne online mush.  And if you don't like it, the same politicians hold the key to your entire digital existence - the central digital identity, without which you simply cannot exist. You can see how this already plays out in China and other totalitarian regimes.

The BBC has also been on a tireless mission of inclusive social engineering, eagerly seeking out, recognizing and celebrating all of society's marginalized waifs and strays.  This process has made robust humour nearly impossible, given that (funny!) humour almost inevitably plays off the unconventional and misfit aspects of society. And when there is not an "off the shelf" example of a suitable oppressed and marginalized group for the "narrative", then the BBC (and Channel 4) would eagerly probe and agitate to help create one.

The social media platform operators - especially those that notionally facilitate discussion and debate,  such Facebook and Twitter, have been hugely influential in creating a cancel culture that limits the scope of the language by reference to community standards. On threat of "cancellation", users are obliged to accept frequently absurd and contradictory limitations on the range of "acceptable" expression and discussion that are mostly established and controlled by vociferous minorities. 

In a country like Russia and China, cancellations are performed by government under the umbrella excuse of state security. It amounts to policing thought by intimidation, so any attempt to express a thought that strays beyond the "party line" is an invitation to cancel. So how can dissent be expressed and shared? The answer is disarmingly simple - once again broadcasting news, knowledge and debate using radio that bypasses state censorship.

Some of us have been trying to point out the folly of abandoning the BBC's respected World Service short wave radio services for years. The UK government departments responsible for this policy were not listening. The original Cold War propaganda rationale had morphed and changed - but not gone away. Never mind that the sulking hulk of Russian resentment has been an ongoing factor that has made occasional appearances that should have reminded us. The brazen nature of these clues was actually breathtaking in a civilized society: Winchester Novichok attacks, Polonium tea, Civilian aircraft targeted over Ukraine, Annexation of Crimea, the increasingly bold propaganda from RT. 

Who is asking how did Russia get away with it? How many useful fools has Bezmenov's KGB placed in western politics and media? RT is an interesting case, it easily picked up on the growing dissatisfaction with BBC News, and made efforts to identify call out the absurdly woke elephants in the populist room - and in doing so become the friend of many BBC listeners who felt they had been abandoned as the BBC relentlessly focussed on issues that are barely relevant to maybe 20% of licence payers.

The cost of building and deploying a new SW broadcast  network to reach all 8 billion of the planet's inhabitants using the latest SW transmission technology would be a fraction of the cost of one fast jet - or a few cruise missiles.

Russia latterly adopted less subtle tactics for controlling the media, when Russian projectiles struck the main radio and television tower in Kyiv. Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence minister, wrote on Twitter that Russia’s goal was “to break the resistance of the Ukrainian people and army,” starting with “a breakdown of connection” and “the spread of massive FAKE messages that the Ukrainian country leadership has agreed to give up.”

I have a suggestion, Boris and Liz...


Sunday, 3 April 2022

Introducing an evolving history of the world:

Introducing an evolving history of the world: From sticks and stones to weaponized words

Last update 17APRIL22   #65  
One for the Only Connect fans

This blog reviews the damage done to global society by the systematic abuse of social media and the internet, presently too much in the hands of plutocrats, conscience-free sociopaths and woefully uninformed politicians. It was offered initially as a series of topic lead chapters, but is evolving into a set of some 15 core topics that will be progressively edited, honed, adpated and re-dated.

The underpinning tech of Blogger is not entirely predictable as the document size inrcreases, but this is overall a better way to organise content than most - especially Facebook which appears to be in terminal decline as an information sharing and  publishing platform.
At some point it should be possible to produce a topic directory list, but it will remain more random than structured.

The internet has also greatly facilitated the process of whistle blowing – namely making public that which an employer or government doesn’t want made public knowledge. Whistle blowers at social media companies are exposing the secretive processes by which their employers – too often sociopath geeks, encouraged by greedy bankers, have inherited the earth, while the regulators and politicians slept.  Facebook employees have been trying to warn the world of the malvolence at the heart of the operation - so who can the rest of us believe?

One especially pertinent video was posted before the 2020 US presidential elections that reported political interference that was specifically endorsed by Facebook policy. As usual, nothing happened, and it was declared “fake news” by Facebook management and largely overlooked by other mainstream media who appear to be unduly deferential to Facebook and its vast advertising budget and influence. 

It seems that a UK metrolectual/millennial clique effectively controls the UK media agenda via Twitter and the BBC, Channel4 and the advertising industry. This clique has become preoccupied with promoting its agenda using classic cultural Marxist tactics of righteous abuse, and limiting the vocabulary available to create a restricted "newspeak"– and pushes the idea that the UK's traditional press is mostly a conspiracy in the hands of right wing reactionaries, promoting an anti-EU, anti-immigrant, pro “rich bastard” agenda. Key bogeymen include Rupert Murdoch (News Corp: The Sun, Times, Talk Radio, News UK TV) the Daily Mail Group, the Daily Express, and the Telegraph. According to the clique, there is no such thing as a “moderate or liberal conservative” point of view. In Metrolectual land, the only recognised states of politics are hard right and righteous enlightened liberal left.

Controlling the social agenda is a long game, and those trying to steer it are well aware that traditional media is being overtaken by online information consumption, where the traditional audience is aging (and let’s be frank, dying off)  and being replaced by tech-savvy and impressionable kids with the attention span of gnats – for whom a Pavlovian relationship with their phone is now the source of everything that informs and supports their modern lifestyle – which is increasingly driven by endorphins triggered by social media approvals.

Endorphins are chemicals produced by the body to relieve stress and pain. They work similarly to a class of drugs called opioids. Opioids relieve pain and can produce a feeling of euphoria. They are sometimes prescribed for short-term use after surgery or for pain-relief.”

Remember that Karl Marx once observed that religion was the opium of the people? Time has moved on, and the crutch upon which milennial lifestyles rely for support is now a mobile phone. Instead of the distilled wisdom of thousands of years of evolved morality, learning and heritage delivered on thinly sliced dead trees, 21st century life is about triggering an audience of hundreds of millions with a photo of a celebrity bust enhancement - in milliseconds.

A crucial part of this transformation has been to establish the idea of “fact checkers” as resources that will attest to the veracity of statements published online, so that purveyors of deliberately misleading propaganda can be called out and exposed; but the dilemma of fact checking is ironically exposed when you want the origin of the phrase:

A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes

 … if you don't want to settle for Mark Twain or Churchill, then Quote Investigator wibbles on for pages without reaching a conclusion, long after the enquirer has got bored and fallen asleep.

A view currently gaining popularity is the observation that

“Once upon a time, banana-republic revolutionaries used to shoot the president and storm the TV station – but these days the subversives take over the fact checkers and deplatform the president…”

Too many politicians asked to comment on media bias avoid the subject and look away. They know it has divided opinion worldwide and the issue is too hot to handle when Facebook (and its invasive spyware) is being used to collude with government policy.

When the internet was first conceived, the idea was to spread the rapidly accumulating benefits of affordable networked information and interaction across the planet, and put it in the hands of the “little people” to help them compete and reach new markets with challeging ideas and innovative products.

This blog is based on content written by a number of pioneers of the online age who set out with the best intentions, and who have been observing and participating since before the first web page was served. We feel in part responsible for allowing control of what has become an attention economy to inadvertently pass to Mark Zuckenberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter - aided and abetted by Apple, Amazon, Google, TikTok and variety of others – especially bankers and financiers – who have been equally derelict in their duty to mankind - but are less personality cults and more faceless corporate money printing machines driven by stock value. For the pioneers, it’s like watching our children being brought up by feckless foster parents, and we would like to at least invite a serious rethink by those who have the power and influence to steer things back on the rails. 

 ###

Keep in mind all interference by politicians tends to have disastrous unforeseen consequences, and the internet was designed from the outset to provide what amounts to a weapons grade communication scheme that would a survive nuclear attack. It can only change as the result of popular demand and participation in the process (if at all).

We have arrived at a point in time and society where the main driving force of the “global economy” – the nebulous concept which ultimately determines if we get fed and survive  – is shifting from domination by the USA, Europe and the West, towards domination by China, India and Far East.

Is the domination benign? Are we generally working openly towards the greater good of mankind – or a malignant pursuit of narrow self-interest?

We  have arrived at a position where UK and US democratic societies (especially) have been divided down the middle – and are now dangerously vulnerable to manipulative propaganda that one “side” of this divide calls “the truth”, and the other side calls “fake news”. This is a big deal, but before we can get into the details it is necessary to establish the starting points for assumptions and propositions that we will be developing.

So where and how did this disruptive period of global destiny start?

There was a point no so long ago after the Clinton presidency (from 1993 to 2001) that politicians declared a “golden age” of stability and prosperity that would continue indefinitely. I cannot include all the references here and the reader must be prepared to google their way to a level of enlightenment that satisfies their individual thirst.

The internet really got going during the Clinton Presidency, after Vice President Al Gore coined the phrase “Information Superhighway” – at which point the benefits and advantages seemed endless and wholly good for mankind. As the economy grew off the back of the new efficiencies and opportunities of technology Politicians were encouraged to look away while the pioneering internet engineers took advantage of the lack of political interference and oversight to accelerate development.

In reality, everywhere the internet has reached is at a considerable risk, since all efforts to filter, censor and control the content that reaches the users have mostly failed. And the use of the internet to spy on populations and countries has exceeded the worst fears of the pioneers. 

They present result is either a free for all with an attempt to apply local law to rein in the extremes using antiquated legal procedures, or a central censorship with the government controlling what users are allowed to see by using a firewall at the point at which the worldwide internet joins local country networks. George Orwell’s 1984 vision of Big Brother became reality in countries like China and Saudi Arabia.

But elsewhere, such is the influence of social media services like Facebook and Twitter, various big brother propaganda alert messages are being inserted regarding pandemic issues, and climate change in “partnership” with the local country governments, apparently in return for the social media platforms being given a form of immunity from data protection and other laws that might cramp their style and ability to hollow out traditional publishing industries in order to feed their stock value..

One conclusion is that the UK government has allowed the authority of the once globally present and trusted BBC to be so reduced in purpose and technical capability, that it feels obliged to work with foreign corporations to communicate crucial information the British people.

How did this happen?

Simple: that capability of the technology developed exponentially according to Moore’s Law and that means that much larger quantities of data can be transferred more rapidly than anyone had thought possible when the early modems ran at 300 bits second.

“Careful what you wish for” doesn’t begin to cover it.

This explosion in technology has overtaken governments and politicians and put the geeks in total charge of the attention economy in countries where they are allowed to operate. China has other ideas, and was not so careless.

One unexpected consequence is that when a hacker finds its way into a home computer on a 100Mbit link, it can scan and empty the contents before the user realises they’ve been breached. The increase in processing power and its shrinkage into mobile devices has enabled speech and image processing and recognition way beyond the expectations of the pioneers of those technologies. Sophisticated tools of spyware are now attached to entire population like tracking tags.

The Clinton/Gore Golden Age of prosperity at the start of the internet had spread across a broad front, but it came off the rails in 2008 when the toxic mortgage crisis almost brought down the Western banking as the result of failed Mortgage-backed securities. The momentum already driving the internet and tech economy was only slightly impacted, most of the damage was done to the traditional economy as banks crashed and manual clerical labour was replaced by networked computer power. Prosperity resumed but instead of vote-buying consumer finance packages, the economy was focused on the endless expansion of tech to drive efficiency and fuel the rise of the billionaires and their trillion-dollar corporations. But this was also the start of the hollowing out of the traditional middle classes as organic growth start-ups without the benefit of lumps of venture capital became a lot more challenging. Every business was now also locked onto a treadmill of constant growth, evolution, education and development. 20 years of experience no longer meant one year of learning, played out twenty times; it means twenty years of constant learning

The export of manufacturing from the USA and Europe to China and the Far East was a crucial part of the efficiency mantra, since the golden age had enabled Western governments to pour resources into vote chasing social and environmental politics and policies while piling up red-tape burdens on manufacturing and start-ups. Meanwhile, China and India cleared the way for their manufacturing entrepreneurs.

The great political divide

Meantime, we seem to be divided down the middle between the silent majority of grumpier older folks who remember life before the internet information tsunami - and now have no idea who and what to believe (in media shorthand this means conservatives (small c) - the right - Trumpsters/Tories) and the liberal left, made up of younger people and academics plus the purveyors of public information once broadly referred to as "the media" that has abandoned its once precious reputation for sober objectivity and opted for subjective triggering - fearing that its audience is no longer interested in being part of a rational and informed debate but seeking to have their mounting prejudices confirmed in an echo chamber.

However the liberal left seems more confident having grown up with the information tsunami and do not appeared to be fazed in the way that older folks seeking to make sense are unwilling to accept that concepts they understood – such that the police tend to be on the side of law and order – are now out-moded and need to be replaced. Although the precise nature of replacement has yet to be determined…

The impatience, impetuosity and self-righteousness of youth combined with a willingness to impose a fashionable point of view without asking permission, is a problem for many.  

There is a legendary Youtube posting with KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov on the subject of information overload, wherein he describes almost exactly what happened when the Soviet Union set in train a long term strategy to confuse and demoralise the US by causing the people to question reality and working on the fault lines in US society – “most of it is done to Americans by Americans thanks to lack of moral standards. Truth becomes irrelevant.”

See this https://youtu.be/Heuwd_7vEJo and ponder. This particular video is hosted by a youtuber who calls himself An0maly (real name Albert J. Faleski) and self-describes as “Good energy. Truth-seeker. Change yourself to change the world! Hip-hop Artist. News Analyst. Human being. Stay blessed.”

He tends to annoy the left-wing dominated “fact checking world” since he is a supporter of Trump with an annoyingly rational and thoughtful approach when the anti-Trump world hopes to be able to unearth all manner of unhinged weirdness. Try as they may, Albert cannot be readily caught out.   Penthouse Australia has posted this extremely interesting interview covering An0maly’s journey from supporting the messiah of the US  political left – Bernie Sanders – to its very nemesis, Donald J Trump.

At the heart of the information debate is the “media” (social and traditional) - a means by which information is usually conveyed – and so a definition of media is essential… in our current context …

“media is the means by which an eager seller is introduced to a potential buyer. It is the job of the medium to gather an audience by publishing interesting content to attract and hold attention – which, given the vast spread of human interest, can be literally anything from the price of cocoa to the size of a celebrity bust enhancement, and then try to motivate the buyer to purchase the goods offered by the advertisers and sponsors, and so be assured of their repeat business.”

Which takes us neatly up to the idea of Attention Economy – a proposition that recognises attention has value, since the start of any human activity begins with the need to attract and retain the attention of the participants in that activity. Whereas in pre-internet world this attention was sought by “propositioning the punters” with notions like “buy one get one free” – the post internet world requires the process to involve devices derived from its intrusive world of espionage and propaganda where the advertiser has your demographic and psychological profile and can program its proposition to get right into your weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

An agitated person is in a better starting place to be influenced than one who is content and comfortable.  Unsurprisingly, the popular media generally sets out to put its audience off balance, and out its comfort zone and ready to be influenced… The British Daily Express newspaper is notorious for publishing stories about “Most severe winter forecast ever …” without any basis in fact, but because they know after years of experience, it grabs attention and sells papers.